Wednesday, April 23, 2014

From the Concourse - an animated map showing the many ways places in the US have been destroyed in movies.

Hollywood clearly does not shy away from destroying their own city. The page includes lists and explanations for each symbol type along with several caveats and a discussion of the fine distinction between monsters and creatures. The yet to be released Sharknado 2 was not included.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Informational Design guru Edward Tufte will be at Fermilab in Illinois tonight at a reception for the Edward Tufte Celebrates Richard Feynman art exhibit. Tufte's three dimensional steel sculptures are built in the shape of Feynman's diagrams. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and star of the wonderful book Tuva or Bust! created these pictorial representations of subatomic particle behavior. Tufte's work emphasizes their inherent beauty.

Fermilab, like the Tufte exhibit, is an intersection of art, science and nature.

Named for Physicist Enrico Fermi, the lab contains the Tevatron, once the world's largest particle accelerator. It is housed in a circular tunnel with a 4-mile circumference, 30 feet underground below the ring visible on the map and showing up clearly on the aerial photos. The Tevatron has been replaced by the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The lab also features numerous other research facilities, bike trails, open prairie and a herd of buffalo. It shows up on aerial photography as a remarkably open space in the middle of the sprawl of metro Chicago.

The reception is from 5-7 PM tonight and there are still tickets (no charge) available. If you're in the Chicagoland area, this would be nice opportunity to meet Tufte and see the fascinating Fermilab campus.

The map was done by taking USGS 30x60 minute map quad sheets, overlaying them onto Google Earth, and extruding the height based on the number of Waffle Houses. More details and data by quad can be seen at mapsbynik's tumblr site. Atlanta is the home base for the chain so their dominance was expected, however the degree to which it towers above the rest of the country is truly impressive.

USGS quads are not a common unit for this type of mapping (counties
would be much more typical) but the quads work nicely for the
Waffle House data pattern. Because the Atlanta area is spread among numerous counties, a county map would spread the data out. This would result in more of a boring low rise edge city look than the towering skyscraper we get here.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

In my continuing quest to make fun of the recent plague of "40 Maps That Will Explain Everything You Ever Needed to Know and Keep Your Breath Minty Fresh" articles such as this one and this one; here are 10 maps that blissfully do not pretend to explain anything. 40 maps is a lot to digest in one blog post so I will break this out into several posts that will appear from time to time.